RAFT is delighted to present the next instalment of Salon For The City… In Salon No.94: City of Vanished Places, writers Tom Bolton, Travis Elborough go searching of the lost landscapes and locales of London.
[ID: scan of a blurry, water-damaged old photograph of a tall and semi-derelict red-brick structure on a sunny day]
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
As Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar once observed: ‘a man could lose himself in London’ - but what of the buildings, streets and entire neighbourhoods that have disappeared from the A-Z?
Tom Bolton and Travis Elborough return to Salon For the City for an evening celebrating the missing bits, maps, memory, places, ruins and the simple pleasure of getting lost in the lost city and far beyond. The evening will include short films by Paul Kelly and Esther Johnson on London's lost cafes and the crumbling coastline of Skipsea in East Yorkshire.
Tom Bolton is the author of Vanished City (2014) and London's Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide (2011), and one the capital’s leading authorities on the city's forgotten haunts and obliterated locales. A ceaseless explorer of London’s ever-changing landscape, he has unearthed the ghosts of Cripplegate, Clare Market and old Limehouse and tracked the city’s buried watercourses from Hampstead in the North to the hidden suburbs of South London.
Acclaimed by The Guardian as one of the country's 'finest pop culture historians’, Travis Elborough has charted the life and times of London’s classic Routemaster bus and the sale of London Bridge to Lake Havasu, Arizona. In his award-winning book, Atlas of Vanishing Places (2019), Travis embarked on a voyage in search of disappearing, submerged and lost landscapes and manmade wonders that have been wiped off the map - from the uncanny stone age remains of Skara Brae to the tiny missing Japanese islet of Esanbehanakitakojima.
Salon of the City talks are followed by a joint Q+A and conversation.